What do I focus on this summer?

I cold emailed them

I think the limiting factor is quality not quantity -- when taking on so many different tasks I find that my quality starts taking a hit. So I suggest prioritizing by stack ranking whats the most important and keeping focus blocks (8-9 hours a day) and doing whatever you can in that block instead of throwing more hours at the problem

Are you getting interviews? If yes then do leetcode instead of project. No? focus on projects

But for the most part I suggest prioritizing getting that return offer, then the research perhaps on the weekend. If you have spare time do some leetcode

I find that when I spread myself too thin I dont get anything done and instead just prioritizing and doing fewer things properly gives me better results in the long run

Thanks for the insight. Unfortunately the project I'm working on is with a group, so it's not like I can fully give up on it (least I can put in is like 5 hours).

The issue I'm having right now is that 3 of the 4 things (research, internship and project) all have stakeholders (my research advisor, manager and teammates), and the only parameter I can sacrifice is leetcode.

With leetcode, at least from what a previous speaker on Taro said, you need at least 20 hours to dedicate weekly to see actual results. I'm already doing the bare minimum, and if I sacrifice more then I might as well not be doing leetcode. But if I'm not doing leetcode then recruiting season this fall will be super rough.

Regarding your question on getting interviews. I'm getting interviews but I'm not happy with my resume screen pass rate. This past season it was 5% with a sample size of around 150. I'm not happy with my interview performance either (I can pass a phone screen on a good day and if they don't ask anything hard). From these interviews I got two offers. Maybe I can get your thoughts on whether these metrics are "good".

I think the issue is that this is a super constrained optimization problem and it's not clear what ratio would yield the best results.

First, a 5% pass rate is actually really really good which tells me you have a really strong profile so congrats on that. Given that I think your focus should then be on converting interviews to offers.

Most students (myself included) see a 1-2% pass rate and its even worse in this market and typically people apply to ~300-500 jobs per cycle

I would then try and do it this way

9-6 internship, 30-60 mins/day leetcode. Weekends research/leetcode/project

While I know the video youre talking about with LC 20hrs/week, I personally think with leetcode you go really far with even just a bit every day. The good thing about leetcode is that you dont need long focus periods (like research) as you can tackle a problem quickly and move on

Even if you do 1 problem a day by the time interviews start rolling (which tends to be before thanksgiving generally) youll have done 90-100 problems which should be pretty solid